55 pages • 1 hour read
Michelle Collins AndersonThe Flower Sisters
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: The Bond Dance Hall Explosion
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death by suicide, graphic violence, and death.
The Flower Sisters revolves around a tragedy that marks the Missourian town in which it is set: the dance hall explosion in 1928. To craft this story, Michelle Collins Anderson draws on a real-life tragedy that took place in her own Missourian hometown of West Plains: the Bond Dance Hall Explosion. This historical event and the tragedy depicted in the book share a number of details, making it clear that the latter draws on the former. Both take place on August 13, 1928, and the explosion causes 39 eventual casualties. Just as depicted in the novel, the final song that the band played before the explosion was “At Sundown.” Additionally, although the number of dead was definitive, the explosion left many bodies burned and charred beyond recognition, and the unidentified dead were laid to rest under a monument in the Oak Lawn Cemetery (Herbolsheimer, Chris. “The Tragedy of West Plains: The Unsolved Mystery of the Bond Dance Hall Explosion.” West Plains Daily Quill, 16 Feb. 2024).
